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On the Question of Violence: Slavery, Sexual Subjection, and Legal Paradigms of Thought

Join the Franklin Humanities Institute for its Friday morning series, tgiFHI! tgiFHI gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretative social sciences and arts the opportunity to present on their current research to interlocutors in their fields. Breakfast is served at 9am.

About the presentation: Arguably the sexual subjection of the enslaved disrupts political philosophical articulations about the origins and uses of violence. By distinguishing violence as a conceptual framework from violent acts, this talk contends that the sexuating forces of modern enslavement interrogate theoretical assumptions that the subject and the world exist in a relational (im)balance constituted by will and action. Thus, by considering legal contradictions around the right to maim and kill the enslaved by sexual means, this talk situates sexually violent acts as what frames the racial distinction between the enslaved/Black and the world, ab initio.

About the presenter: Patrice Douglass is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University.